Programmer-assisted Automatic Parallelization

Parallel software is now required to exploit the abundance of threads and processors in modern multicore computers. Unfortunately, manual parallelization is too time-consuming and error-prone for all but the most advanced programmers. While automatic parallelization promises threaded software with little programmer effort, current auto-parallelizers are easily thwarted by pointers and other forms of ambiguity in the code. In this dissertation we profile the loops in SPEC CPU2006, categorize the loops in terms of available parallelism, and focus on promising loops that are not parallelized by IBM's XL C/C++ V10 auto-parallelizer. For those loops we propose methods of improved interaction between the programmer and compiler that can facilitate their parallelization. In particular, we (i) suggest methods for the compiler to better identify to the programmer the parallelization-blockers; (ii) suggest methods for the programmer to provide guarantees to the compiler that overcome these parallelization-blockers; and (iii) evaluate the resulting impact on performance.MAS